Where LINGUIST List is Going...

Currently, the LINGUIST List is going in many directions as it increasingly moves to the forefront in the development of language tools, software, and archive systems. Here are a few of our new projects:

E-MELD (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data) is a five-year project which involves the digitization of data on endangered languages as well as the development of an infrastructure suitable for collaboration among e-archives.

This requires the development of tools and software that would allow field linguists to input their data into a database structure.

One such development is FIELD, a flexible tool which is customizable to accommodate language data of many different language families and typological configurations.

Language Classification and Identification
LINGUIST List has done extensive work in language classification and identificaton, and is currently in the process of developing a web-based prototype for language classification.

In order to properly classify linguistic data, LINGUIST List needed an extensive code system of world languages. It was concluded that the most nearly complete and consistent system of codes for extant languages belonged to the Ethnologue.

E-MELD has complemented the Ethnologue List with codes for extinct, ancient, and constructed languages.

LINGUIST and Ethnologue have agreed to merge their codes into a single code-set, which will be known as the Universal Language Code set or ULC. The complete set of codes is now an OLAC standard.

LINGUIST List has also developed the most comprehensive language search on the web, which allows you to search for languages and language families by code or name.

LL-MAP: Language and Location, a Map Annotation Project. In collaboration with the University of Stockholm, IGRE, and 5 international archives, LINGUIST will develop a geographical information system (GIS) mapping language information to geographic, political, and economic features. (HSD 0527512)

GOLDcomm: The long-term goal of the project is to offer the average linguist access to large amounts of structured and searchable linguistic data. The two-year GOLDComm project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant (BCS 0720122).

LEGO: The LEGO project (Lexicon Enhancement via the GOLD Ontology) is taking a number of lexicons (provided by their creators) and digitizing them. After these lexicons are made available online, they will be tagged with terms from GOLD, the General Ontology for Linguistic Description. As this data will be linked to GOLD, the lexicons will be interoperable. This means that users will be able to construct linguistically interesting queries using the lexicons drawn from 16 different projects which cover more than 300 languages. This will be a significant resource for typologists, semanticists, lexicographers, translators and other researchers.

Collaboration with OLAC
Through increased collaboration with OLAC
(Open Language Archives Community), LINGUIST List is making searching the web for language resources easier than ever before.

In order to make linguistic data more easily accessible, the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) has assembled an online database, similar to a large library catalog.

Information on language resources in a variety of formats (ranging from field notes to A/V recordings) is stored as metadata (in XML format) in this database, which is then easily searchable through the OLAC search engine.

Linguist List is a service provider for this catalog by housing it on the site, which not only allows linguists to search OLAC through LINGUIST List, but also to become data providers for the project.